I can write a book about a boy wizard's adventures wizard school and that's legal, but if I call them Harry Potter it isn't.
I can create Harry Potter fanart and distribute it online pretty freely - but slap it on a mug and sell it, and that's illegal.
I can record an audio description of a painting that's as detailed as I like and it's legal to distribute - but take a photograph of the same painting and it's a derivative work, no matter how artistic my choice of camera settings.
We don't really have any prior examples that are precisely like these huge ML models trained on copyrighted data - and depending on which imprecise analogy you choose, you can come to a different conclusion.
If your fan art is infringing, it was infringing whether or not it was on a mug or on dropbox.
Photograph one is not true. For commentary it can be by audio, or printed on a mug or whatever, commentary is transformative. Go out and take a photo of the world outside, if you live in a city you've captured thousands of copyrighted materials in your image. Maybe it captures someones painting, maybe it doesn't. Whether its fair or not is if it's transformative, the format doesn't matter.
I'm not seeing an ethical difference from any of this. Or did I miss the point?
Perhaps I should have said Darth Vader, then - the point is you can copyright a character independent of the copyright on a book's text, and the trademark on the series name, and the fact that broad concepts like "black-clad masked evil overlord" are uncopyrightable. And that copyright can persist even if you transform a book character into an engraved coffee mug.
> I'm not seeing an ethical difference from any of this. Or did I miss the point?
The difference is:
If a person says "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as an audio description is to a painting" or "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as the concept of boy wizards is to harry potter" they would probably say it's ethically fine.
If a person says "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as a photograph of a painting is to the painting" or "Stable diffusion is to its copyrighted training data as video lecture is to a single image in its slides" they might well say it's not ethical.
Depending on how close it is it may not even be legal. To give a music analogy: at least in my country, if you take a melody, change all the notes' durations, and transpose it you'd still infringe
So Donald Buck who is a duck is too derivative, but Ronald Cluck who is a bear might be fine.
So since automated driving will result in financial suffering to those working in trucking and Uber and whatnot, automating driving is not ethical?
Think of this instead: a doctor collects a big volume of symptoms and analyses and creates a statistical way to cure people more easily. They publish many examples of their work without licensing anyone (legally and morally) to use it freely. Now some algorithm collects their data and many others data and transforms it into a better method. A doctor suffers from going out of business. Is that ethical? On one hand, the algorithm invented something new and easier to access. On the other, it basically stole parts of their and similar researches on a previously unthinkable scale. We humans copy ideas all the time and this is somewhat normal, but this enormous at-scale capability was never a thing.
Personally I don’t care for optometrists, uber drivers or designers. Nature will find a way. But when we talk about fundamental social contracts like property or accumulated knowledge protection, I think it is unethical to break them, regardless of technicalities. If it’s such a great advancement benefiting everyone, why can’t AI creators just ask permission for 2.3B of datapoints they used?